About This Site

This web exhibit is a companion to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Americans and the Holocaust exhibition, which opened at the Museum in Washington, DC, in April 2018. The exhibit is the result of five years of intense research, and examines the motives, pressures, and fears that shaped Americans’ responses to Nazism, war, and the genocide in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

Americans and the Holocaust examines various aspects of American society: the government, the military, refugee aid organizations, the media, popular culture, and the general public. It aims, like all of the Museum’s exhibitions, to motivate audiences to think critically about the lessons of the history as individual citizens, as a country, and as members of a global community.